The Household Spirit (12 page)

T
he assaults began when Emily was fifteen, shortly after her night terrors ended. They were not the same things. They were to occur nearly every night, occasionally more than once an evening. Lights on didn't help, and Emily had outgrown prayer. Sleeping pills made her more vulnerable, and suicide, the teenage idea of which she'd indulgently flutter around, made even less sense than the prayer. If she died completely they would have her completely. It'd only mean calling it quits on the illusionary waking world. She'd become more herself, not less. Emily, concentrated. The waking world, as intangible and absurd as it was, was the only stuff that stood between herself and hell.

In the very beginning, she couldn't even talk about this with her grandfather. She hadn't wanted to disappoint him or worry him more than she already had. He'd been so proud of her, finally sleeping through the night. Now this? It was too bad to be true.

—

It starts with a tearing. Not like paper, more like sleep is ripping itself in two, and with it, Emily's head. She hasn't been anywhere, anything, and then she is back. She is no longer asleep
.

This is crucial
.

She is no less awake now than she is during the day, walking around outside. But she cannot move. She cannot open her eyes. Emily tries, but
she is locked in, keys lost. There is no way not to panic. It is exactly like waking up inside a corpse. It is not a dream. It's not even a nightmare
.

Imagine a frantic, violent struggle without a single moving part. It is as if the temperature of reality has changed. She can feel herself, every unresponsive part. Her head on a pillow, hair on cheek, blankets bunched up between her knees. Emily feels her knees. Her knees feel like tiny stone islands. Her belly. A shoulder, her lungs. Do not think about the regularity of breathing, which she feels and cannot control and that is beyond horrific: air passing back and forth between her lips like mocking, intrusive spirits. She is breathing, but she is not breathing. Something is breathing her
.

Hearts don't beat, they gulp. If you really listen, if you really feel what they do to you inside your chest. The heart is her only moving part and it is a bloated, disgusting thing
.

And then they are on her
.

Emily's entire head is submerged in screaming. It is a sound that is also a churning, howling physical field. Voices suffocate her, squeezing her. Not her body, not that yet, but the unnamed her at the center of things. Imagine a riot. Imagine the sound of this riot slowed down. Imagine anger as slow sound being poured into your head. The roar and gibbering of madness. Emily feels like she is being eaten alive, from the inside out
.

She is wide awake
.

She cannot move
.

Her eyes will not open
.

Emily is just so small here. If you could see her. Trapped inside of who she's supposed to be in a bed in a small room in a house that is small in the middle of nowhere, and she can hear the nighttime pines groan. Tall trees listing in the wind. Through it all, she can hear rain on the roof, the Kayaderosseras fuming, and a truck. The truck sounds like a zipper ripping open the road. There is an outside her house and an outside her body and then there is Emily: a small, trapped, lost nothing. She cannot move. They will not leave her alone. Beyond the storm there is the sky, she thinks. She tries to focus. Surely there's a sky with a moon and it should
matter but it doesn't matter because Emily is way too busy being buried alive inside her own body. There is nothing kind or loving watching over her
.

If these attacks convince her of anything, it is that evil is a thing like fire is a thing. Evil is real. She tries to open her eyes. Start small, she thinks, tries to think, holding on to small thoughts, a wreckage of words and phrases; the debris of everything she is as the screaming swallows her up. She tries to wiggle her fingers. Toes. Say the word
.

Toe.

But her tongue is heavy and dead inside her jaw. She has to remain alert or she'll be nullified, swept up into these sounds forever. They want her; they feed off her fear. They produce it, harvest it. They grow full with it. But she can't not be afraid
.

They?

Then there's a drawing back. There always is
.

It is just as sudden
.

The sounds stop and coagulate outside her into silence. Listen to the room. Because it is inside her room
.

Footsteps approach her bed
.

Sometimes, here, Emily is lucky and she returns to her physical self. Before the footsteps reach her, she sometimes bursts back alive inside her body again, jolts upright in bed. Hands scrabbling for the light, as if she could physically hold on to light
.

This time she is not lucky
.

The footsteps stop. It is right there, standing over her. He has stopped. She knows that it is male in the same way that she knows it is evil. Or that it is cold outside, wet. You can feel evil the same way you can feel the wind
.

Evil feels nothing like wind
.

It waits above her
.

It watches
.

What does it see? Her body? Her who? What? Emily wants to go home, to be home, to have the keys to her body again. Because then, sometimes, they will be on her
.

On her chest, something pushing down so hard that she cannot breathe. Sitting on her chest. Squeezing her chest of air, and her body of herself: trying to push Emily out of herself like toothpaste. Or: it will grab her neck. She will feel hands, actual hands, around her neck. Smearing her head back down into the pillow
.

But this time it sits down on the bed beside her. Like: you and me, we need to have a little talk. The weight of it, the way the mattress buckles a bit next to her, shifting her body toward where it is sitting on the bed next to her. It begins to rock. Sitting beside her, back and forth, slowly, then not so slowly. It is trembling. Emily hears the creaking of the bed beneath her—beneath them both—and she hears its breath. It draws closer to her paralyzed face
.

I'm sorry, Emily thinks
.

Please
.

Help me
.

Then, like stones thrown sharply into her head, Emily's eyes break open. She springs up. She sobs. And there it is. And it is even worse than she could have imagined: her empty room
.

—

Emily suffered a year of thinking she was insane, possessed, worse, before breaking down one morning and telling her grandfather what was happening to her when he thought that she was finally sleeping soundly. She was sixteen years old.

Standing over her, concerned, hands gripping the back of the chair—when he was most concerned Peppy stood—he directed Emily's “computing.” He disliked the internet. “Well, suppose we have to look
in there
, Em. Type in
Google
. Typing it in up there would be best, I think.”

“Peppy, I know how to search the internet.”

“Sure you do,” he said. They stared at the Google home page. “Now ask it a question.”

Despite Peppy, they found the term pretty quickly. Sleep paralysis. There was a name for what had been happening to her, and
Emily began to cry. She'd never imagined that what was happening to her could happen to others; it felt too hateful, idiosyncratic. Didn't everyone go insane in her own way?

But here were entire websites, scientific studies, and virtual support networks. Others reported the paralysis, of course, but also, incredibly, the footsteps, voices, the pressure on the chest. That all-pervading sense of an evil presence. Some people even had visual hallucinations—
so-called hallucinations
—the shape of someone standing over the bed, watching, a shadow man moving across the room. Initially, this information had been a relief. She didn't need an exorcist or an institution. It had been named.

The more Emily read, the less sense it made. The anesthetic of it being a
named thing
wore off in increments. Peppy's voice came back to her in relation to the still inexplicable night terrors: “Well, we already know she's terrified at night!”
Emily already knew that she became paralyzed after being asleep
. But not in her sleep, as was insisted. She was awake when it happened. One hundred percent. On this point she had no doubt. “Like this,” tapping the table in front of her, telling Peppy, “I'm as awake as you and I are right now. Exactly like this. But I cannot move. It's like being in a coma plus full consciousness. It doesn't feel like it will ever end.” The scientists had gotten the so-called symptoms correct and, it turned out, there were many who suffered from this thing. Though none, it would seem, as frequently or as extremely as she did. Emily began to feel as if she were someone suffering from a debilitating migraine, reading about the occasional headache.

The explanations curdled. They wanted Emily to believe it had something to do with
dream leakage
—a lovely way of putting it that meant that she awoke, ostensibly, in the middle of REM sleep, right at that point where your body is paralyzed—because if it wasn't, Emily learned, you'd freakishly act out your dreams, flailing around like a maniac. So there you were: wide awake but still paralyzed, and the dream stuff just started leaking in, drip drip
drop
,
and this somehow accounted for everything. It was a glitch of the brain.

But if the dream leakage concept was true, then the type of stuff leaking in would be
limitless
. Wasn't that obvious? Did scientists not dream? The leakage could be anything, sex or Smurfs or musical raccoons. Yet all the people who suffered from SP reported almost identical things. Moreover, she learned that most cultures had traditions encompassing this phenomenon. It was historic, as old as recorded thought. In Newfoundland, Emily learned, they called it the Old Hag. In Newfoundland you could even send the Old Hag to people by reciting the Lord's Prayer backward. (Yes, Emily tried this, and no, there was no way of knowing whether she successfully hagged Lori Freeman.) These things were noted throughout history. It was always a part of us and our conception of sleep. The word
nightmare
itself meant to be ridden by the night mare, as in horse, as in being crushed by whatever these things were, ridden to death. Nightmares, originally, didn't mean bad dreams. Because these weren't dreams. Leaks? Emily wasn't leaking. The more she read about her condition, the more convinced of its reality she became. It was no more a glitch than anything else. Every culture seemingly had a word for it, and a similar supernatural explanation. Incubi and succubi, those rapey demons, of course, but there were so many others. In Mexico it was
subirse el muertro
. The dead person on you. In Fiji,
kana tevoro
. Being eaten by a demon. Emily liked that. In Kashmir it was a
pasikdhar
, which was believed to live in every home and only attacked if God was ignored: punishment for a person who basked in the misfortunes of others. Every single one of these words made more sense than
sleep paralysis
.

Karabasan
.

Kaboos
.

Haddiela. Jinamizi
. They infested humans like lice. Emily wasn't special. She was only cursed. She particularly liked
ogun oru
, which was what some Nigerians called it.
Ogun oru
. Nocturnal warfare.

—

Ethan, I don't know what's wrong with me. I'm afraid. I don't know how to sleep. Oh, and Ethan? I've been nocturnally assaulted by demons since I was fifteen years old.

It was impossible.

Because when Ethan slept,
he slept
. Sleep was another of his switches: awake, asleep, he snapped cleanly from state to state. She never woke him, even clinging to him afterward. She was surprised that
they
didn't wake him, actually. That he slept through the roaring, the footsteps approaching their bed. Emily's body being pressed into the mattress.

But of course he must have sensed something.

He allowed Emily a personal space that occasionally bordered on disregard. Did he realize how much she needed that? Maybe. She'd even catch him making sure that she noticed that he wasn't noticing her, giving her space. The way, after a minute of this, he'd look at her, smile.

“Knock it off, Ethan! Your eyes are tickling me!”

He closed his eyes.

“Sometimes you look at me as if I'm made of numbers,” she said. This was the night before Emily left Boston for good. She didn't know that she was about to leave Boston for good. She continued, “Like I'm long division you're doing in your head.”

“Nah.” He thought about it. “But I hate math.”

“Should I be concerned?”

He opened his eyes. Nodded yes. Said, “I love you, Emily.”

I
t was both as improbable and obvious as the sun being a star. Of course he did. Probably Emily even loved him.
Loved him, too
. So why couldn't she say it? Maybe it was only that Emily's sense of motion was deficient, that feeling of falling. Not the end splat of real love, just the vertiginous, romantic drop. Or was that what she'd been experiencing all along? Who did she think she was kidding here?

Jesus.

Emily had just dropped out of Boston University. Speaking of drops. Two weeks ago. She hadn't told anyone yet, least of all Ethan or her grandfather. They'd both wrap the decision around themselves in a way that Emily needed to avoid for as long as possible. Let this one be hers. For now she wanted to savor it, think around it, hold the immensity of it in her head, telling herself: Oh my God you will not believe what you just did.

But here came Ethan with his bulky, destabilizing I love you. Like he knew. Like he was preemptively reaching in and grabbing the hand of her awesome, mysterious future before it had a chance of doing anything truly awesome, like leaving Boston, or him. Neither of which she wanted to do, but still.

She'd imagine moving out of Ethan's apartment. She'd call Maxi or Shumon, or maybe Lizzy or another of her JP lesbian bros. They loved moving women out of the apartments of men who didn't
deserve women; she'd call them and they wouldn't ask questions because that would presuppose that they didn't already know. They knew. This was the opposite of what Emily wanted, but she had to constantly, obsessively replay the event in her head to make sure. Breaking up with Ethan. She did this so she could arrive at the point of the fantasy where she realized that she couldn't live without him.

But instead of telling Ethan that she loved him too, she pretended that she hadn't heard him. Then they stopped talking altogether. Then he got up, went to his desk, started tapping things with his pen.

Maybe being truly in love meant elevating her own lusts and emotions to a level of seriousness that Emily just wasn't comfortable with. People need to believe that life is serious. Emily, to stay sane, had always assumed the opposite and behaved likewise. Serious was a slippery slope. Start giving the daytime Ethan stuff its due and you're going to have to listen in close to the night as well. This Emily could not do. But how could Ethan know? She hadn't told him. She couldn't tell him so he didn't know and so it wasn't his fault and, anyway, she really felt like she had bigger things to deal with right now.

Something was wrong in Queens Falls.

She'd called Peppy twice today. Or, more accurately, she'd called nineteen times in two nervy batches: one in the afternoon, one an hour or so before Ethan's I love you. No answer. This was unlike him, though not entirely unprecedented. The TV could be on too loud, that had happened before, or the phone could've been left inside the refrigerator again, under a blanket, upstairs, in the bathroom on top of the toilet. He was ninety-three years old. He'd once taken the phone out to his car by accident, left it in his glove compartment overnight. Phone batteries died sometimes too.

Too? Shut up, Emily.

Peppy could be at Price Chopper! He could be back in the garden doing whatever, the tomatoes, digging around. Though, since his slipped disk, gardening was less likely…

He could be dead
.

Shut
up
.

“Ethan,” Emily said. “Hey, Ethan?”

“Yeah.”

“Can we talk?”

Ethan had removed his shirt. Emily didn't know if this had anything to do with her inability to say that she loved him too. He was reading at his desk.

“Just come back to bed,” Emily said. “I don't know. Come here. I'm feeling weird, Ethan.”

“I'm fine where I am. Honestly. Don't worry about it.”

He wouldn't turn around. You couldn't always tell if he was breathing or not, his back was so solid and expressionless. Emily said, “There's something I want to say.”

“You don't have to say anything, Emily.”

“I dropped out of school.”

Ethan's neck tensed.

“I know,” he said.

“What? Please turn around.”

“Maxi told me,” he said, finally facing her. “She was worried. I don't know, Emily. It's not like it's a big shock or anything, your lack of scholarly ambition. I told Maxi to chill, that I trusted you. That you know what you're doing.”

“Come to bed, Ethan,” Emily said. “I don't know what I'm doing.”

“I know, but you know that much. That's more than most people.”

“Do you really believe that?”

Ethan shrugged.

Emily said, “You're upset that I didn't talk about it with you, that I kept it a secret.”

“I was, I guess.” Ethan yawned. It was about 10:00 p.m. Ethan made no move to come to bed. “But what else is new?”

“Ethan?”

“What?”

“I'm worried about my grandfather.”

“What do you mean?”

“He's not—” Emily began, and there it was: she crumbled. Suddenly it was real.
“I think he's in trouble.”

—

Seven hours later Emily was in a taxi, alone, heading for South Station. From there she'd take the first Trailways bus to Albany, New York, then another to Queens Falls, and then walk to the hospital that had finally called her around two in the morning, three hours ago.

Her phone began buzzing as soon as she got to South Station.
ETHAN CALDWELL
. Then again. Three texts she wouldn't open. Then a call from
BOO
. Then two from
MAXI
. One from
LIZZY
. Ethan must have called them all. Then more from
ETHAN
. She enjoyed feeling the phone vibrate in her hand; it was the closest that she could let Ethan come to her right now. It wasn't close enough, but it was something. Ethan holding her hand like an angry chunk of bees. Finally, she turned it off.

The last hour had not been easy. It had been their first fight, in a sense, but Emily had been adamant, even vicious about the fact that Ethan could not accompany her to Queens Falls.

The sun had come up earlier than it was supposed to. The birds were insane. “What is
wrong
with the birds?” Emily had shouted.

“They're singing,” Ethan said.

“They're screaming.”

“Emily, it's going to be OK. Please calm down for a moment.”

Did she know that she wasn't coming back? She'd packed all three of her suitcases, most of her things. Ethan didn't get it. Emily didn't either. Because she loved the smell of the mornings here, she'd thought, stuffing her suitcases. Loved it all. Despite the motherfucking birds. The smell of the flowers waking up downstairs, the snoring delivery trucks of flowers pulling up each morning beneath Ethan's window…

The thought of Mr. Jeffries dialing a telephone made Emily
want to cry.
He had a fully operational human voice
. Harriet Jeffries's recorded voice on Mr. Jeffries's answering machine had been a shock (
“My technophobic dad's not home right now. Or, who knows, actually. He probably is. Either way, leave a message after the—”
) and then the most comforting thing, as if her fantasy BFF was there for her, finally, in her hour of need. Harriet would help. Now, Mr. Jeffries hadn't spoken with Emily, or even gotten the message to Emily that he'd called the ambulance, that her grandfather was alive and on his way to the hospital, which, yes, would have been the fully operational human being thing to do, but what did she expect? The guy was a tree. She'd ruffled his branches enough so that he'd done what needed to be done and that was all she could or would ever ask of him. He had saved her grandfather's life.

Emily on her hands and knees, rooting around under the bed, Ethan's desk, the sofa.

“What are you doing?”

“Nothing.”

“I'll help.”

“No, it's OK. It's nothing.”

Emily did not want him to find the ring. Ethan was the Noticer, something he called himself. Because he noticed things. It was true, of course, and it was maddening and not half as cute as he thought it was because every time he crowed about noticing wasn't he also highlighting the fact that Emily
wasn't
? Emily was the loser. She lost things. She forgot where she placed things. She could ask Ethan anything, where anything was, and he'd know. Where's the purple hair clip?
There
. Hardly lifting his head from his computer, priestly finger pointing. There. And, yes, there it would be. You see my phone charger, Ethan? The nail clippers? My purse? Under that book. In the bathroom, behind the toilet. I think I saw it by the pile of
JoongAng Daily
s. Respectively. It was uncanny and, at first, Emily thought that maybe sometimes he actually hid her stuff just so he could impress her by finding it. But, no, he was simply alive to details like nobody she knew, details he didn't even know he'd
retained until she tried calling them up, pulling them out of him. They'd test this. It rarely failed. Ethan liked to think it had something to do with the fact that he saw everything multiple times, in many languages. “Like I've got eight eyes.” “More like you're Rain Man,” Emily once said. “More like you're the white Korean weirdo in a movie who helps the adorable heroine find stuff.”

She was searching for a thin 14-karat gold band. Emily had found it under the living room sofa when she was ten years old. She liked to think that it'd once belonged to her mother, Nancy, and, moreover, maybe it'd been given to Nancy by Emily's father.

For a few childhood years Emily had a ritualistic thing she did. She'd wear the ring and stand before the bathroom mirror, on which she'd taped photographs of her immediate family. Nancy. Peter. Gillian. Then she'd stare at herself, blurring her eyes, staring
behind
her image, as if her face were a Magic Eye picture, finding each one of them—Nancy Peter Gillian—in her own face and then, with some effort, subtracting them. Erasing all the Nancy Peter Gillian she could find. Her father was what remained. High, wide cheekbones. The dark hair, of course, and the freckles. For an electric moment, Emily's father would form, and sometimes he'd go even further and develop his own features. These were stern, unhappy. Masculine lines not suggested in Emily at all, and Emily would hold on to him, desperate. But as soon as he was conjured, he'd collapse back into the Phanes: Nancy Peter Gillian Emily flooding back into the ten-year-old's helpless face.

The ring had almost certainly belonged to one of Peppy's lady friends. She had never worn it in her grandfather's presence. She'd put it on after she got to school and take it off before she got home. She needed it to be what it was. It was one of the few things that they couldn't share, and, because of this, it was the closest thing that Emily had to a piece of her dad.

Ethan stood above her. “Hey,” he said. Of course he'd found it.

Emily, on her knees, took the ring and said, “I do,” smiled. They both smiled. But not for long.

Then the asshat taxi honking outside with the birds. Ethan helping her suitcases into the trunk. “You really need everything?” he asked, finally.

She couldn't explain it.

“Emily?”

“I'm sorry, Ethan.”

They hugged, did not kiss. Ethan went in for one, but Emily veered to the side, tilting her head down; then, realizing what she'd done, tried to kiss Ethan, but no dice. He'd already stepped back. They looked at each other.

The Trailways bus left South Station at 6:00 a.m.

Boston reeled, turned; it righted itself and was suddenly behind her. Emily closed her eyes. Ethan could have jumped into the taxi with her. Wasn't there a last minute where he was supposed to have opened the door and hopped right in? What had stopped him?

Emily had.

Because this is what would have happened otherwise: Ethan would have met Peppy. Privately, Emily would have told her grandfather no big deal.
Peppy, I want you to meet Ethan Caldwell. He's never worked a day in his life. He's secretly Korean. We're not serious
. Ah-phooey, Peppy'd wave his arm. Bunk. Because he'd see it. Unless he never opened his eyes again, how could he not see it? She could almost fool herself, but Peppy? He would see that she loved Ethan Caldwell and that Ethan was a good, deserving man who loved her too, and, happily, Peppy would let himself go. That would be that. They would have murdered him.